Rare News Desk
The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) published a study Monday that found excessive militarization of police due to the rising use of SWAT teams to execute ordinary search warrants is disproportionately affecting minorities, and African-Americans in particular:
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All across the country, heavily armed SWAT teams are raiding people’s homes in the middle of the night, often just to search for drugs. It should enrage us that people have needlessly died during these raids, that pets have been shot, and that homes have been ravaged.
Our neighborhoods are not warzones, and police officers should not be treating us like wartime enemies. Any yet, every year, billions of dollars’ worth of military equipment flows from the federal government to state and local police departments. Departments use these wartime weapons in everyday policing, especially to fight the wasteful and failed drug war, which has unfairly targeted people of color.
SWAT team usage has gone up for two main reasons: Post-9/11 spending security increases and the shift to what are called “multi-jurisdictional” SWAT teams.
A Salon.com story last year explains the first phenomenon well with contributions from the Washington Post’s Radley Balko, an expert on police state excess.
“Since 9/11, the newly formed Department of Homeland Security has distributed billions in grants, enabling even some small town police departments to buy armored personnel carriers and field their own SWAT teams,” Alex Halperin writes.
“Once you have a SWAT team the only thing to do is kick some ass. There are more than 100 SWAT team raids every day in this country,” he continues. “They’re not chasing murderers or terrorists. For the most part they go after nonviolent offenders like drug dealers and even small time gamblers.”
Balko noted the correlative relationship between SWAT teams and the war on drugs, in conjunction with post-9/11 security increases.
“The drug war is what got us to a crisis point and Sept. 11 just kind of blew it out of the water. A Pentagon program hit its record in 2011 by giving away about $500 million of equipment. [Department of Homeland Security] grants in the last 10 years have given away $35 billion. DHS has accelerated the trend,” Balko said.
Multi-jurisdictional SWAT teams have given SWAT teams usage even more reason to go up, having “reduce[d] the budgetary constraints of local departments and agencies, as these costs are shared between several organizations.”
In fact, “SWAT teams are currently called out over 540,000 times a year nationwide, as opposed to just 3000 times per year on average in the 1980’s, but most of these ‘call-outs’, according to statistics, were to serve warrants (Balko 2006).”
All of this leads to one big question and then a subsequent question with a smaller scope: Is it a good idea to use SWAT teams to serve warrants as general rule, and are our reasons to extend that usage to serving non-violent drug offenders sufficient?
The evidence, especially that provided by the ACLU, seems to indicate no.
Kriston Kapps of Citylab.com notes that “67 percent of Americans think U.S. policy should focus on treatment, with just 26 percent favoring prosecutions for people who use drugs.” Even still, “79 percent of the incidents reviewed by the ACLU involved a SWAT team searching a person’s home” and “more than 60 percent of the incidents reviewed involved a search for drugs.”
The ACLU’s graphs yield some staggering numbers, particularly the wide racial disparities.
There are no shortage of accidental killings and racial groups are disparately impacted. Three out of every four Americans in prison for marijuana offenses is either black or brown despite both groups using the drug at about the same rate.
Maybe it’s time to relegate the SWAT team to it’s former glory, when it was used mostly for active shooter type situations — only 7 percent of the ACLU reviewed SWAT raids involved “hostage, barricade, or active shooter scenarios.”
